Automatic sewing machinery is known in the prior art and is employed in the sewing industry for specific operations. For example, there exist machines for sewing pockets onto men's shirts and similar functions. Such machines are quite complicated and expensive and are totally dedicated to the operation for which they are designed. Thus, for example, the machine designed for sewing pockets onto shirts cannot be converted to another operation is shirts without pockets are demanded by the market.
Programmable sewing machines presently exist and are known for carrying out selected sewing functions. Such machines nevertheless required skilled manual feeding of the cloth into the machine, and during the sewing operation. For the sake of clarity, feeding of cloth into the machine prior to sewing will be referred to as "positioning to the needle" and feeding of the cloth during the sewing operation will be referred to as "guiding".
The automatic sewing machinery presently known and in use may thus be appreciated to have the disadvantage that it cannot be used flexibly in response to changes in customer taste and demand. Therefore the garment industry has remained essentially an unautomated industry at the sewing level.
In conventional sewing operations, material is supplied to each workstation in bundles. Even if these bundles come directly from the cutting floor, they are normally not ordered with sufficient precision to allow mechanized pick up. Therefore, a skilled operator is required to properly position the workpiece to the needle. Following each sewing operation, the workpieces are usually placed in a hamper without maintaining their positional orientation. Thus a skilled operator is also required to position to the workpiece to the needle in every subsequent operation. PG,4